Hi everyone and happy new year,
About 6 months I posted a bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/sbcl/+bug/1009267 ("(gc :full t) has no effect
under certain circumstances"). This bug has attracted little interest,
despite being, in my opinion, quite significant. The bug was marked
incomplete. I added more details as requested, but it is still marked
incomplete. I have not even got an official acknowledgement that this bug
is reproducible. I am at this point quite confident this is real, since I
have been able to reproduce it on other machines, besides my home machine,
different versions of SBCL, and also a friend who does not know CL was
able to reproduce it following my instructions. I just checked, and this
is still reproducible for me on 1.1.2. As I say in the report, the most
significant thing about this bug is that it breaks (gc :full t).
See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/sbcl/+bug/936304. As I comment there,
that (similar) bug is also still reproducible, even though it is marked as
closed.
This bug only shows up under relatively special cirumstances. However,
these relatively special circumstances (large float arrays being created
and destroyed) are not uncommon in scientific computing. It is also worth
emphasizing that I can only reproduce this bug on x86. I'm not sure why it
does not show up on amd64, but that being so, it may reduce the number of
people who are exposed to this bug.
I realise that this bug may be considered low priority, and also may be
difficult to fix. However, I would appreciate at least a confirmation that
it is reproducible.
Regards, Faheem Mitha
--
Under the two moons of Hydrot, and under the eternal stars, the
two-inch wooden spaceship and its microscopic cargo toiled down the
slope toward the drying little rivulet.
--
James Blish - Surface Tension
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